Drake shook his head and replied frankly:  ’One can be too previous.  I made that mistake once before, and I don’t mean to repeat it.’

He remained silent for a moment or two, and added:  ’I think I’ll tell you about it, Mrs. Willoughby.  You have guessed some part of the story, and you are Clarice’s friend, and mine too, I believe.’

With an impulsiveness rare in him, which however served to rivet him yet more firmly in Mrs. Willoughby’s esteem, he confided to her the history of his proposal and its lame result.  ‘So you see,’ he concluded, ’I am not likely to risk a repetition of the incident.’

‘But,’ said she, ‘surely there’s no risk now?’

’Very likely, but there is just a little.  This next fortnight will, I think, make everything secure, but I must wait that fortnight.’

‘Well, I believe you are unwise.’  Drake turned to her quickly.  ‘Why?’

’Mr. Mallinson takes your place for the fortnight.  Of course I don’t know.  Clarice has given up confiding in me.  But I really think you are unwise.’

Drake sat staring in front of him.  He was considering Mallinson’s visit in conjunction with the reappearance of the emerald ring upon Miss Le Mesurier’s finger.  ‘All the same,’ he said at length, ‘I shall wait.’

The reason for this hesitation he explained more fully to Clarice herself some half an hour afterwards.  He found her standing by herself upon the terrace.  She started nervously as he approached, and it seemed to him that her whole figure stiffened to a posture of defence.  She said nothing, however, and for a while they stood side by side looking seawards across the breadth of the island.  The ground stretched away broken into little hollows and little hills,—­downs in vignette.  A cheery yellow light streamed from the windows of a cottage in a dip of the grass; the slates of a roof glistened from a group of sycamores like a mirror in a dark frame; the whole island lay bared to the moonlight.  Towards the edge of it the land rose upwards to a ridge, but there was a cleft in the ridge opposite to where they stood, and through the cleft they looked downwards to the sea.

Clarice spoke of the moonbeams broken into sparkles by the ripple of the water.

‘Like a shoal of silver coins,’ said Drake.

‘Wouldn’t you like to hear them clink?’ she asked petulantly.

Then he said:  ’Miss Le Mesurier’—­and the change in his voice made the girl turn swiftly to face him—­’I leave Sark to-morrow morning by the early boat, so I thought I would say good-bye to you to-night.’

‘But you are coming back,’ she said quickly; ’I shall see you, of course, when you come back.  What takes you away?’

’There’s some land in Matanga which bounds my concession on the north, and I want to get hold of it.  It’s, I believe, quite as good, and may be better, than mine, and I know that some people are after it.  It wouldn’t help me if another company was to be started; and as the President of the Matanga Republic is on his way to England, I thought that I had better go out to Madeira, catch his steamer there, and secure a concession of it before he reaches England.’